We have been having issues with audio output devices disappearing when using multiple monitors.
We have two monitors connected to a single GPU, and the audio output to first one consistently fails to appear when if the second monitor is connected
at boot.
However, if we run xrandr the audio output reappears and everything works as expected.
This is the aplay -l output before running xrandr:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 10: HDMI 4 [HDMI 4]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 11: HDMI 5 [HDMI 5]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 12: HDMI 6 [HDMI 6]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC1220 Analog [ALC1220 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 1: ALC1220 Digital [ALC1220 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
And this is the output of the same command after xrandr has been run:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 10: HDMI 4 [HDMI 4]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 11: HDMI 5 [HDMI 5]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 12: HDMI 6 [HDMI 6]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC1220 Analog [ALC1220 Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 1: ALC1220 Digital [ALC1220 Digital]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
What changes is the numbering of the subdevices. But I’m not sure if that is significant.
What could cause xrandr to affect the sound output?
On another system we’ve had this problem on the loss of audio output was not as consistent: sometimes everything worked as expected on boot. For that reason we also suspect that this might be caused due to some race condition on boot, perhaps connected to a systemd service. But we have not been able to find any evidence for that.
We have tried using the 525 version of the driver, and that does seem to fix the issue. But if possible we would like
to find a solution for this issue without changing to version 525.
uname -a:
Linux comp 5.15.0-72-generic #79~20.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Apr 20 22:12:07 UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux